The invention generally relates to computers and computer software and, in particular, to methods, systems, and computer program products for maintaining up-to-date pre-computed search results, such as travel recommendations, stored as cached data, such as the data cache maintained by a global distribution system.
Travel agents and travelers may use computer-based devices to interface with a travel reservation system, such as a global distribution system (GDS), to shop for travel recommendations in connection with a trip. When interacting with the travel reservation system, the travel agent or traveler may initiate a session between a client device and the travel reservation system to shop for travel recommendations and to eventually book one or more travel inventory items (e.g., flights and hotel rooms).
The session between a client device and the travel reservation system typically includes a request for which the response requires a database query. Large volumes of data must be processed to provide a short response time to these database queries. For example, such computing-power intensive processing must be performed in response to open queries that contain only little input information (e.g., only one or two parameters out of a dozen possible parameters are specified and/or the specified value ranges of the parameters are broad) and, consequently, generally lead to a large number of results (e.g., travel recommendations). Possibilities to speed up data processing by increasing hardware performance are limited.
Query times may be shortened by pre-computing expected queries and maintaining the results corresponding to each expected query in a cache system. Arriving queries are directed to the cache system instead of being processed on the large database. However, caching approaches may not be able to maintain up-to-date pre-computed search results in order to ensure that the cached results correctly reflect the status of the corresponding large database. If the underlying data changes in the database, the cached query results may become outdated and the cache system may return incorrect results.
Improved methods, systems, and computer program products are needed to maintain up-to-date pre-computed search results, such as travel recommendations, stored in a data cache, such as the data cache maintained by a global distribution system.